Imagine for a moment, that all
the media including, television, radio, magazines, and newspapers had a
political opinion that the elections did not deserve any coverage. Imagine that these media outlets
rarely, if ever, gave any publicity to candidates running for office. The reasoning for this hypothetical
opinion would be that the elections just aren’t very important and they don’t
merit any attention.
Given the enormous amount of
coverage that the media gives to democratic and republican party candidates,
this idea appears to be strange.
However, the above scenario has always been the routine policy of all
capitalist media outlets.
For the past forty years I have
supported the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party. In order to be placed on the ballot, we
have collected an onerous number of signatures. Rarely, if ever, do we receive any media attention. We can also make this same argument
about the other political parties that are not democrats and republicans.
Elections are about people who
represent various political parties running for office. When the news media makes a decision
not to give any coverage to candidates who are not democrats or republicans,
they are deciding not to give coverage to the elections.
Imagine for a moment that
President Barrack Obama and Willard Mitt Romney received the same publicity as
the Socialist Workers Party candidate James Harris. Clearly, most people don’t know the name of James
Harris. If the media gave the same
publicity to Obama and Romney, most people wouldn’t know their names either.
Why is this important?
When we look at our paychecks we
see deductions made for city, state, and federal taxes. When we purchase most commodities we
see more deductions for sales taxes.
Someone who has a salary of about $30,000 per year will see at least
$300,000 in deductions made for taxes over a period of thirty years.
When we pay for commodities we
want, we decide which are the ones we will purchase. When we supposedly “pay taxes” we don’t get what we
want. The only basis for the
argument that this is “our tax money at work” is the fact that we are allowed
to pull levers in voting booths one day every year.
The only way we know of the
candidates who are running for office is because of media publicity. When the media decides that it will not
give publicity to candidates who run for office, they are making an argument
that we do not deserve a representative government.
Understanding these facts we can
come to an inescapable conclusion.
That is that we do not “pay taxes” at all. In fact, our rate of pay only reflects our net income after
taxes.
Today, because of the
deteriorating state of the capitalist economy, the government is becoming more
open in its slavish support of corporate power. When fifty million people in this country do not have enough
food to eat, the government demands that many of these people pay over $700 per
year for third rate health care.
This money will be a cash windfall for the insurance and drug companies.
Who does the news media represent?
Today about one percent of the
population owns about half of all financial wealth. There is no reasonable explanation for this. For this relationship to continue, working
people need to be convinced that the government that supports this one-percent
of the population is good. We need
to be convinced that this reprehensible disparity of wealth represents “liberty
and justice for all.”
While the news media argues that
they are “objective” in their reporting of the events of the day, another
picture is becoming crystal clear.
Because the news media clearly supports capitalist interests, they need
to give us a jilted view of the world.
They have argued that the best
way to aid some of the poorest people in the world in Afghanistan or Vietnam is
to go to war and kill them. They
argue that the best way to help working people in this country is to give tax
incentives to corporations that are owned by the wealthiest people in the
world. While capitalist
politicians talk about how they want to “create jobs,” these same politicians
supported governments that allowed over 300 million jobs to be eliminated.
These are the reasons why the
media needs to be indifferent to candidates who run for office and offer a
different view of how to resolve the problems we face. In 2008 the international capitalist
economy nearly collapsed. The
pressures that created this crisis continue to be with us and we can expect a
collapse of the economy in the future. The candidates who support the capitalist system have made it
clear that they have no plan to avoid this kind of catastrophe.
When working people become aware
that we have no economic future with the capitalist system, we will become open
to new ideas. Masses of people
will seek new sources of information that will take a serious interest in how
to advance a rational political course for our future.
